Oftentimes in working with WordPress I find that I don’t want things to be as automatic as they are by default. Or, more precisely, I want things to be automatic in a very custom way to fit a certain theme and design.
An example of this is excerpts, this WordPress function annoyed me for a long time, but Advanced Excerpt by Bas van Doren relieves this pain.
In my case, the pain arose from trying to layout text in a grid-style theme. Some of the blocks were populated with photos, while others were not. I wanted to be able to control the excerpt length so that blocks with photos would feature short post excerpts while those without photos would be filled by a larger excerpt.
With over 92,000 all-time downloads, Lightbox Plus is a very popular solution for displaying large images elegantly in a WordPress blog. Lightbox Plus displays images in a pop-up, framed box while darkening the rest of your site.
This is a much more elegant and user-friendly solution than either shrinking large images down to fit within the design of your site or leaving them to be displayed as an image-only page.
It can be easy to let security slip your mind when you’re building a website or blog with WordPress. Thankfully, there are some great tools out there that will let you easily check on the security status of your WordPress-based site and remind you of further steps you ought to be taking to protect yourself.
WP Security Scan can help keep your site secure by quickly displaying the folder permission settings critical to your site’s security, testing the strength of your passwords, hiding the version of WordPress you’re using from being displayed, hardening your database, keeping bad guys out of your admin panel, and obfuscating meta tag information in your site’s code. If some or all of this sounds a little bit above your expertise level, the plugin makes it easy and walks you through the steps necessary to turn your site into a virtual fortress.
Okay, it’s already Wednesday, but this is a Plugin Monday post anyway. Enjoy!
You may have heard of PubSubHubbub, a brand new Internet thing with a typically silly name. But what is it? Essentially PubSubHubbub turns RSS/Atom feeds from a polling technology, into a push technology, hence the acronym PuSH.
RSS/Atom feeds—the things that allow people to subscribe to your blog or website updates—rely on a mechanism called polling. Basically polling means that your feed reader, like Google Reader, has to periodically “poll” your subscriptions by visiting feed sources and checking for updated content. Depending on how often your RSS reader polls your feeds, you could be receiving news updates 30 minutes or more after they’re posted. In many cases this may not amount to much, but if your job hinges on your ability to react to breaking news, PubSubHubbub start looking pretty awesome.
PubSubHubbub solves the delay problem by pushing your updates out to subscribers who have feed readers that accept the PuSH protocol. The “Hubbub” part of the name references a hub—the computer that does this data pushing. PuSHPress for WordPress turns your WordPress installation into such a hub, one that requires no configuration or setup apart from installing the plugin.
PuSHPress was developed by Automattic’s Joseph Scott—Automattic is the umbrella company founded by WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg—so you have no reason to worry about compatibility issues or future updates.
So, download the plugin and install it today. The server load should be minimal, so the downsides of implementation are negligible.
For those of you interested in the more nerdy side of PubSubHubbub, get the skinny on this spec from Dave Winer, the father of RSS. Others may be curious to learn how some folks think PuSH may threaten Twitter.
Ever wonder how we manage to have a beautiful image illustrate every one of our posts on this site? Well, the secret is an incredibly handy WordPress plugin called Photo Dropper. It lets you easily search for, and insert into your posts, Creative Commons licensed images from Flickr.
Using the plugin is simple. When you want to insert a photo, you click the Photo Dropper button that is added to the “Upload/Insert” menu at the top of the new entry page in WordPress.
This brings up a search dialog where you can enter in keywords for to search for photos. Type some in and you’ll get back lots of interesting photos and graphics from which to choose. Click on one and it will automatically be inserted into your post.
The beauty of this plugin isn’t just that it makes it easy to find photos, but that it also makes it easy to respect copyright. In the plugin’s preferences you can choose the type of license to which you want search results limited–commercial or noncommercial. That way you know you’ll be using photos legally and ethically. Photo Dropper also takes out all the pain of giving credit to the image’s author because it automatically inserts the correct attribution and link back to Flickr. And as a bonus: Flickr hosts the image, reducing the stress on your server.
Here’s a bonus tip for those of using the Thesis WordPress theme: follow these instructions to edit your custom.css file so that when you use Photo Dropper, the images are nicely formatted and aligned left or right as you see fit.
Note: Presidents’ Day festivities delayed Plugin Monday. We hope you can make-do with this rare Tuesday edition of our weekly WordPress plugin feature.
In the spirit of the recent Daytona 500, this week we’ll be covering a plugin that will make your site speedier, WP Super Cache.
Unlike other plugins that put more load on your server’s process and slow down your site’s load time, WP Super Cache make your site faster by creating static HTML files from the PHP scripts that run WordPress. Those HTML files will be served in place of your dynamic WordPress pages, saving your server an incredible amount of strain.
This plugin is especially useful for WordPress users running WP on underpowered servers or users experiencing heavy traffic flow. This means that running WP Super Cache can save you cash by allowing you run WordPress on an inexpensive server without feeling all the lag that can often come with cheaper hosting services.
WP Super Cache is cleverly designed so as not to interfere with the functionality of your site in any way. Dynamic pages will still be served to users who are logged into your site, users who have left a comment (so they can see them), and users who are viewing a password-protected post or page, so there’s no need to worry about WP Super Cache affecting the experience of your users. If anything, user experience will be improved dramatically as your site will be faster and more responsive.
If you decide to move forward with installing WP Super Cache, it is important to note that installation involves some small edits to your site’s wp-config.php file as well as the .htaccess file. These edits aren’t very extensive, but errors in the code of these files can cause your site to have serious errors or be disabled entirely, so be sure to make backups of these files before you begin the installation process.
To Install the plugin, follow the detailed instructions on the plugin’s page at wordpress.org. Once you have the basics of the plugin up and running, I’d recommend leaving all the defaults in place with the exception of enabling Super Cache Compression. Though this compression feature can cause problems with some server setups, chances are that your server will deal with this option just fine and compression will make your site just that much faster.
No matter how you configure WP Super Cache, it’s a good idea to browse through several pages on your site, make a few test comments, and visit any password protected pages in order to test the caching functionality. Be sure to do this both while logged into your site and while logged out.
After your installation is complete, get to work promoting your site on Digg, as you’ll be able to absorb the traffic of a Digg front page link without a problem.
If you have any questions about installing WP Super Cache, please leave a comment or send an email to info@readymadeweb.com and we’ll get back to you and the rest of our readers with an answer.
As we’ve talked about on ReadyMadeWeb previously, FeedBurner is must-have tool for any blog or website. It future-proofs your feed so it can move with you to a new CMS, it ensures that your feed is compatible every sort of feed reader, it tracks your subscriber numbers, allows you to monetize your feed, and pushes your posts out to update services around the web.
However, just because you’ve changed your WordPress site’s link from the built-in feed address to your FeedBurner feed, doesn’t mean your users are necessarily accessing your FeedBurner feed. The built-in RSS feed your site can also be accessed through the RSS auto-discovery feature which is now standard on all the major browsers. In order to ensure that this feature detects your feedburner feed, you’re going to need the FD Feedburner plugin. The plugin will redirect these auto-discover tools to your FeedBurner feed, ensuring that subscribers are accessing your feed the way you want them to be.
FD FeedBurner also gives you the option the redirect comment, category, and search feeds to ensure that every single one of those built-in WordPress feeds is overridden by FeedBurner.
As a follow-up to my post about the iSite’s iPhone and Android app-building service, I wanted to cover an alternative way to bring your WordPress-based site to mobile devices. WordPress Mobile Edition by Crowd Favorite is very quick and easy way to create a very stripped-down, simplified version of your site for mobile devices.
This plugin is actually a plugin/theme combo pack, which adds a few steps to the plugin installation processs. After you download and unzip the files using the link above, you’ll find both the plugin file, wp-mobile.php, and a folder called “carrington-mobile-1.0.2.” Place the plugin file in the wp-content/plugins directory and the Carrington theme in the wp-content/theme directory. After you activate the plugin, visitors using mobile devices will be redirect to the new minimalist, gray theme.
The plugin’s settings page, which can be found other the Settings menu in the backend of WordPress, allows you to edit lists of mobile and touch device browsers that will be redirected to the mobile theme. I’ve removed the iPhone and Android from our list as I find the full site more usable and better-looking on my iPhone than the alternative theme. You should consider doing similar testing with your site and soliciting customer feedback to determine what platforms really need a specialized mobile theme and which should continue to see your standard design.
Speaking of feedback, if you’re using a mobile device to access ReadyMadeWeb, please leave a comment below and let us know how the site looks and performs on your device.
Overall, this plugin is great—it provides a very easy-to-navigate alternative to a standard theme. But, it would be nice to have some basic customization of the theme—like choosing a new color palette—built into the plugin’s settings menu. Additionally, building-in or at least linking to a mobile phone emulation/testing website would be helpful. That said, none of this takles away from the fact that this plugin is a great alternative to creating multiple website-as-app solutions for individual platforms like the iPhone or Android.
For more on mobile plugins for WordPress, check out the list of top WordPress mobile plugins at WordPress feed.
Today’s Plugin Monday is focused on sidebar widgets. A plain vanilla WordPress install has a nice set of widgets for the sidebar, but they are fairly limited in how they present information to the user. Here are three plugins to help you with both the form and function of your sidebars:
PHP Code Widget – This plugin is exceptionally handy as it allows PHP code to be executed within sidebar widgets. Normally WordPress only allows HTML within the sidebars. This plugins open widgets up to the addition of PHP functionality, creating a new type of widget called simply “PHP Code” which can be used multiple times just like the “Text” widget. This added PHP functionality compliments other plugins that create new PHP functions which can then be called into the widgets. Both plugins below are great examples of this.
Update: Because of security concerns with plugins like PHP Code Widget, we recommend using the plugin with caution. Though many WordPress users are actively employing this plugin, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s safe or secure. This plugin allows PHP to be written directly to the MySQL database, meaning that any user that has access to this plugin would essentially have access to the whole site as they could insert code to give themselves such rights. So, only use this plugin on sites that are already well-secured and are being used by a small number of trusted users. When possible, use the standard method of widgetizing code rather than using PHP Code Widget.
If you have any information about other security risks associated with this plugin, please post a comment.
Multi Column Category List – Save space on your site while leaving all of your categories visible (not hidden in a drop-down menu) by using this handy plugin from Dagon Design. The plugin uses a bit of PHP magic to split your list of categories into columns. The number of columns can be changed in the plugin’s settings screen. The category list can be added to any page or post using trigger text (<!-- multicollinks -->), or called directly from a template file by using <?php echo ddmcl_generate(); ?>.
The plugin also has the option of splitting the list up into blocks based on letter. For example, links to Amazon.com and Ask.com would appear under the “A” heading. This could be useful if you have an especially lengthy blogroll.
The one tricky part of using this plugin is properly configuring the CSS file. Make sure to place the CSS file included in the root folder of your current theme. This applies to theme frameworks like Thesis as well—don’t place the CSS file within a “custom” folder or other framework mechanism.
Within the plugin’s CSS file, you’ll find these lines of code, defining the basic column style:
Be sure to set the width of this style small enough to allow for two columns of that size to fit into wherever you’re placing the trigger text or template call. If you set the width too wide, you’ll be left what appears to be the same, single-column list you’re used to. This is caused by the second column being bushed below the first, which will look no different than what you started with.
Multi Column Link List – This plugin gives you the same functionality as the plugin above, but with links rather than categories. The CSS file placement and customization for the category plugin also applies to this links plugin.
You can see the PHP Code Widget and Multi Column Category List in action in our sidebar here at ReadyMadeWeb.
WordPress’s extensibility, its very expandable model that allows for this sort of customization, is powered by its huge developer community. So, if you use these plugins, please consider donating to their developers. Your donation compensates them for a little bit of their time and can provide a lot of encouragement to keep them working for the betterment of the WordPress community.
As always, if you have any questions about about using these plugins or anything else we’ve blogged about at ReadyMadeWeb, please email us at info@readymadeweb.com.
This week’s Plugin Monday addresses managing comments. Allowing comments on your site means allowing conversations to take place. These conversations keep people coming back to your site so they can see how their opinions were received by other readers. Eventually, comments turn into discussions and discussions turn into communities of readers who add content, and therefore value, to your site.
But comments have their downsides too, like abusive “trolls,” people who would rather be insulting or vulgar than add to a conversation. Comments can also become confusing when they get derailed by conversations wholly unrelated to the original topic.
Thankfully, all of this and more is solved by DISQUS, a brilliant commenting system, that includes features such as:
Threaded comments and replies so that readers can respond to other readers, indenting them under that comment, so it’s clear when a reader is responding to the post itself and when he/she is responding to another reader’s comment.
Notifications and reply by email, which allow readers to track the conversation on your post and easily contribute more comments.
Subscribe and RSS options, which just like email notifications, keep readers coming back for more.
Powerful moderation and admin tools to cut down dramatically on the amount of time you spend moderating comments. This includes easy black and gray lists, which make the process of keeping comments civil a lot faster.
Full spam filtering, making moderation almost totally unnecessary.
Support for Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo! and OpenID sign-in systems, freeing users from the hassle of filling out their name and email each and every time they comment. This quick logins also allow for comments to become tweets or status updates that promote your site.
DISQUS also retains copies your comments in your WordPress database, so you’re not giving up ownership of your comments, making the plugin essentially risk-free to try.
Installation is also a breeze. The plugin requires no special treatment outside of creating an account with DISQUS, which can be done beforehand or from the WordPress comment menu once the plugin is installed.
DISQUS has been downloaded over 60,000 from WordPress.org and is undoubtedly running on hundreds of thousands of sites given its cross-platform nature and incredibly functionality.
To learn more, check out this video from famed tech blogger Robert Scoble:
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